ain, those who were natural appealed
to her. As to men of Dr. Sperry's stamp and the idle youths who
chattered to her in the world which her mother had forced her into,
these she detested.

* * * * *

During the long winter months Big Shanty lay buried under tons of snow
and ice. The broad bed of the stream became unrecognizable; its roar
muffled. Along its wild course the boulders showed above the heavy
drifts, capped with a sea of white domes, like some straggling city of
sunken mosques. Along the bed of the brook open wounds gaped here and
there, while at the bottom of these crevasses the treacherous black
water chuckled and grumbled through a maze of passages, breaking out
at rare intervals into angry pools, their jagged edges piled with floe
ice. For days at a time the big trees moaned ceaselessly; often the
snow fell silently all through the day, all through the bitter cold of
the night, until the knotted arms of the hemlock were cruelly laden to
the cracking point, and the moose hopple and scrub pines lay smothered
up to their tops. Always the crying wind and the driving snow.

As the winter wore itself out the sun began to assert its warmth.
All things now steamed at midday, dripping and oozing in sheer
gratefulness; the snow became so soft that even the tail of a wood
mouse slushed a gash in it, the dripping hemlocks perforating the
snow beneath them with myriads of holes. Soon the woods were oozing in
earnest, the warm sun swelling the young buds. Day by day the roar of
Big Shanty Brook grew mightier, its waters sweeping over the boulders
with the speed of a mill race, tearing away its crumbling banks.

With the opening of spring Holcomb started work in earnest. The woods
reverberated with the shouts of teamsters. Soon the deserted clearing
became the main centre of activity, echoing with the whacking strokes
of axes and the crash of falling trees. Horses strained and slipped
in their trace chains, snaking the big logs out to the now widened
clearing--slewing around stumps--tearing and ripping right and left.

By early March the clearing had widened to four times its original
size, reaching for rods back of the shanty; the air had become
fragrant, spiced with the odour of fresh stumps and the great piles of
logs stacked on the skidways.

At last the work of chopping ceased. Then began the ripping whine of
saws and the wrenching clutch of cant hooks; loads of clean planks
n